Capitalism wins! Does anyone need more proof than seeing sponsors in Russia's mission control room?posted by jdiaz (9 comments total)

Haa! Nice. Now they just need nylon Nike jogging suits.posted by Hankins at 5:05 PM on March 22, 2001

I want to know what exactly the "wiener scan" company does ;-)posted by milnak at 5:19 PM on March 22, 2001

Capitalism versus what? Market capitalism and State capitalism?

Marxism or anarchy has yet to be tried on any nation-wide scale.posted by capt.crackpipe at 6:08 PM on March 22, 2001

anarchy has yet to be tried on any nation-wide scale.

Huh. Tell that to the people living in places like Somalia, Haiti, Albania, Afghanistan, Colombia, Cambodia, Indonesia or any of the other places w/o or with a barely functioning "government."

Although I'm sure there's some tribe out in the Amazon that might fit the definition of utopian anarchy.posted by redleaf at 10:02 PM on March 22, 2001

Marxism or anarchy has yet to be tried on any nation-wide scale.

Marxism or anarchy will never be attempted in a way that those ideologies' supporters will accept as legitimate. Pure Marxism and pure anarchy both require one to blindly accept certain beliefs about human nature that simply aren't true, namely that all people are more concerned about the good of society than they are about themselves. Since this isn't the case, Marxists and anarchists then point to all the those nonconformist indiviudals as supposed proof that "we didn't really try it."posted by aaron at 12:28 AM on March 23, 2001

All that sponsorship money and their tracking screen still looks like it came from a 60's Bond movie.posted by Markb at 12:59 AM on March 23, 2001

Yup, nothing new here. The post-Soviet space industry has been incredibly capitalistic. Consider:

* sponsor banners in the control room

* television ads done on Mir

* sponsor logos on rockets

* even a giant inflated Pepsi can attached outside Mir

* every cosmonaut is an independent contractor, who negotiates the details of his flight with a lawyer at his side: duration, number of experiments, bonuses (for spacewalks, unscheduled repairs, etc.) and debits (for screw-ups, delays)

* for most of the 90s, the third seat on every Soyuz was literally sold to other space agencies, like Japan, Germany, and France; during Mir's worst problem-prone periods, the cosmonauts begged for two flight engineers but Russia needed the hard currency too much

By contrast, NASA is socialist heaven.posted by dhartung at 1:24 AM on March 23, 2001

Pure Marxism and pure anarchy both require one to blindly accept certain beliefs about human nature that simply aren't true, namely that all people are more concerned about the good of society than they are about themselves.

I don't see how this is true about anarchism. As far as I understand it, anarchism is the idea that coercion, in any form, is unacceptable, and therefore a government based on coercion rather than consensus is inherently illegitimate.

How does this require beliefs about human nature that aren't true?

I have no idea what an anarchist space agency would look like, but the words strung together like that sound dramatic.

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